I see that Josh Kraushaar, writing at National Journal sees Elizabeth Warren somewhat as I do, a poor choice for a presidential candidate:
If a candidate’s strongest case for electability is that she won a Senate seat in the most Democratic state in the country—in a banner year for the Democratic Party—then she’s got an electability problem.
The fact that Warren is still hanging onto her victory over Brown is revealing. It would be the equivalent of Republicans reveling over defeating Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama in next year’s election—a result that many GOP officials expect, given the conservative nature of the state.
Every other bit of empirical evidence on Warren’s standing back home is much worse. Her job approval in Massachusetts is down to 49 percent, according to Morning Consult’s latest quarterly survey—the fifth-highest home-state disapproval rating in the entire Senate. Among Bay State Democrats, she lags behind both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in presidential primary polling. She won 60 percent of the vote against a no-name opponent in last year’s Senate race, unable to improve on Hillary Clinton’s performance. (Charlie Baker, the Republican governor, won 67 percent of the vote running on the same ballot.)
albeit for somewhat different reasons. Leaving aside his complaints about “electability”, which some these days view as code that she’s a woman, my reason is that she won’t bring black voters to the polls. The core of the Democratic Party, like it or not, is not young voters, Hispanic voters, or white women with college educations. It’s black voters over 50. Black voters under the age of 50 are not the reliable voters to whom Democrats have become accustomed.
I don’t think that black voters will suddenly vote Republican en masse but it wouldn’t take that to deny Democrats a victory in 2020. All it would take is more blacks voting for Trump than voted for George W. Bush amid generally weak turnout among black voters.
One of Woody Allen’s more memorable wisecracks is that 80% of life is showing up. Black voters over 50 show up.
Wasn’t there something in that family lore about a Black ancestor too?
And then there’s that. A blue-eyed blonde who has never experienced being a Native American claiming the mantle of victimhood for personal gain is shameful in the extreme.
It may not surprise you, but every major college has one. A Native studies professor who claims ancestry or Tribal adoption, and they’re all White. Maybe the fault lies with native peoples themselves for not supplying suitable candidates to Universities to fulfill diversity quotas.
But my greater concern about her as President is what Walter Williams wrote about Barrack Obama, that a nuclear weapon would be used on an American city and he would surrender the country for the sake of the world. She may not have the steel it takes for that level of creative destruction.
That’s a long-standing gripe of mine about quotas, preferences, and set-asides. Far, far too frequently they do not benefit the people they presumably were intended to and provide benefits to people they were never intended to. Among blacks far too many of the benefits of such programs go to sub-Saharan Africans or Caribbeans. I think that white folk dig the accents.
Such arrangements must either be taken seriously or abolished.
It begs the question; who are Warren’s fervent supporters, and are any of them previous apathetic or tended to split votes between the two parties?
For example, Trump’s coalition is different from W’s or Romney’s coalition. Trump lost a lot of voters who used to be dependable Republicans (like in Texas), but in the process gained a lot of split voters (esp in the midwest).